Lost without translation

It’s clear from the annual Frankfurt book fair, the world’s largest, that books originally written in English are displacing books in other languages and from other traditions. Big international publishing conglomerates, the demands of book chains and declining sales all narrow the range of what’s available to read.

At Europe’s main international book fair in Frankfurt each October, the non-Western world is increasingly irrelevant, and even continental Europe has difficulty maintaining its own publishing businesses in a market dominated by the English language. The Frankfurt Buchmesse brings together 6,000 traders from 115 countries at the most important date in the literary calendar, when translation and reproduction rights for almost every kind of book are bought and sold. Some 400,000 works, more than 100,000 of them new, are represented there each year.

But the vast Frankfurt fair cannot hide the two problems of authors, booksellers and readers worldwide. The spectacular decline of publishing in poorer countries (which includes most of the former Soviet bloc) can be seen at the Asian, African and South American pavilions, ever smaller and further away from the centre. Fewer publishers from these countries are present each year and those that are there receive less attention from buyers. And Frankfurt reflects the increasingly one-way flow of trade between the United States and its sidekick, Britain, and the rest of the Western world. French, Spanish, Italian and German publishers all go to the fair with a single and near-impossible dream: to sell a book to the Americans even for a derisory amount, or to a British publisher as a first step to the paradise of the US market.

They all know that this is a false hope. Of the 14,000 books published in Britain each year (twice as many as in France), only 3% are translations. The US manages only 2.8%. And selling the US rights to a book, always cheaply, perhaps for just a few hundred dollars, does not guarantee that it will be marketed. Publishing and bookselling have become highly concentrated and demand ever more immediate returns. This has transformed the status of books, which are now thought of as just another product to be submitted to the norms of industrial management and financial profitability.